What makes it so shocking to me is that I made the item without ever having played a single session of Pathfinder. In fact, I haven’t played a system pen-and-paper RPG in maybe seven years. I’ve never written anything professional for the games industry and never developed anything this crunchy.

I recused myself because of time constraints, since I didn’t plan around advancing in a prestigious design competition on my first try in a system I’d never used before, and I doubt I’d do as well once the challenges require a deeper understanding of Pathfinder, its campaign setting, and module design.

It is, however, the greatest possible confidence booster I could ever wish for as I start to poke at the periphery of the game industry.

I’m not sure if anyone’s interested in my process, but I wanted to throw it out there for potential future RPG Superstar designers who are new to Pathfinder and might not submit because they feel inexperienced.

In this post I’ll take my process and item, break them down, and explain how each part came together–the good and the bad.

A brief background

I’ve been a tabletop gamer for 17 years, though much less of one in the last 5. Most of my sessions for those first 12 years were in WEG’s D6 Star Wars and FASA’s Shadowrun (2E) and Earthdawn (1E). I played three sessions as a fill-in on a D&D 3.5 campaign seven years ago and haven’t touched a proper system since, outside of sheeting a few characters for freeform play.

In any system, I’ve GM’d a total of maybe 2 hours across that span. Always a player, rarely behind the screen.

Outside of gaming, I’ve been a professional copy editor for six years with some freelancing on the side. I hope working with language helped here, especially with limited word counts.

Before I wrote a single word

I heard about Superstar on the patronage boards for Open Design’s Journeys to the West project (which I’ve rather sadly neglected since the holidays). After I posted to a brainstorming thread, someone cheekily mentioned using one of my ideas for a Superstar item.

I’d just bought the Pathfinder Beginner Box from my FLGS and played through the box’s solo session so I’d have a basic grasp of the system. After Googling “RPG Superstar” and reading the Superstar info and rules, I figured the Wondrous Item design challenge would be a great way to learn Pathfinder.

So I borrowed a copy of the Pathfinder Core Rulebook from a friend and got rolling.

RTF&R

(Read the FAQ & Rules)

A no-brainer for everyone who’s done Superstar once and mandatory if you haven’t, the rules lay out the uncontestable limits, like the format, deadline and maximum word count.

RTFF

(Read the Fantastic Forums)

I read every single one of Sean K. Reynolds’ tips threads twice. I read #27 three times.

I also considered why they existed and read threads of past winners to see what worked, what didn’t, what judges wanted and what they absolutely hated.

In the process, I saw least two paths to making a Superstar item:

• Be creative within the restraints of the rules
• Creatively throw the rules out the porthole

You can’t do either unless you understand the letter and spirit of those tips. I put myself in the judges’ shoes–roleplayed, even!–and re-read past winners to figure out which scenarios would inspire Sean’s tips.

RTFC

(Read the Fabulous Corebook)

I’d never worked with Pathfinder before and never created an item in 3.5. The heft of the corebook drove something home right off the bat: I’d have to read the whole thing. You can’t make a magical item without understanding how it’d be used, and you can’t do that without at least a surface understanding of how everything else works.

The great thing about Pathfinder’s core book is that it covers everything. You don’t need another book to know everything necessary to build an item.

The awful thing about Pathfinder’s core book is that it covers everything. You have to learn how to navigate it efficiently or you’ll run yourself ragged.

Getting to work

Create one “great” idea, then throw it out

This is a long-standing habit of mine when writing anything: I write exactly what I want out of the gate, indulging every whim. I marvel at it, my face consumed by a grin, so ready to paste it into the entry blank and send it out that I’m trembling.

Then I throw it away.

This isn’t due to nerves, and it (mostly) isn’t masochistic. In my experience, my first instinct rarely generates my best idea.

If it really is the best idea I’ve got, I’ll find out when I sit down to come up with a different, better idea and can’t. But until I write that first draft, get it out of my head and destroy it, I likely won’t ever be satisfied with anything else.

And since I was starting from a limited base of knowledge and experience, I needed all of both I could muster in the least time possible.

My first item, if I remember it correctly, was a compass designed around finding fragments of a broken item. It had a hole in the middle, you stick one piece of a broken item in it, it points to the nearest compatible piece.

I thought the concept was great until I wrote it, ran it through Sean’s tips and read it again.

As a potential GM–even with my slim knowledge of Pathfinder or GMing–I didn’t regret trashing it at all. It was a lame idea. It violated too many tips for too many reasons, but more importantly, it made things boring for the PC and frustrating for the GM.

I rechecked the math on the pricing and found I’d even gotten that wrong.

Waste of time?

Hell, no.

My original goal was on target: I was learning a hell of a lot about Pathfinder/3.5/d20 in very little time. I had to read a few dozen different spells to find the ones most suitable for item construction. I had to understand how skills worked to grok their role in item creation. I needed to understand gear to understand item slots and game economics for pricing.

Most importantly, I was getting a clearer picture of the difference between a fun item and an overpowered item. The compass would make a good plot device in a specific scenario but a terrible general-purpose enchanted widget.

Pick, and stick to, a strong idea

I knew from the tips that entering a time item was playing with fire even though time items had made the Top 32 before. But after tossing the compass overboard, I wanted to play with time.

In running the encounters from the Beginner Box, I died three or four times in combat because of bad rolls, particularly Initiative rolls. The Box emphasized Initiative at every opportunity. And when I put my Level 1 Fighter in front of two weak enemies at once and watched him get chewed up in the assault, I caught on pretty quickly to how much of an advantage movement and attack order could provide.

Because I’d settled on a theme I loved, I knew what I wanted: a physical object that would let the PC capture time when they didn’t need it and apply it when they did. (The most notable Superstar inspiration here was Eric Hinley’s 2010 Top 32 entry, Hourglass of the Insightful Conjurer, which planted the concept of an item containing time rather than directly manipulating it.)

Time travel was right out because it’s a complex subject with no inherent rules. So I sat down with the solo scenario from the Beginner Box and broke down the combat process to find places where being able to manipulate time would apply. My list was

• Initiative
• number of attacks
• movement speed
• Reflex saves

(Notably, the Beginner Box does not mention attacks of opportunity. The scenarios and rules leave them out, and they didn’t factor into my testing even after I read about them in the Core book.)

Because I wanted a container, saves would be a tough thing to manipulate–if I have to save just to take half damage on something, how the hell would I use it as a container? Strap it to my chest in case I set off a trap?

Initiative was potent to mess with, but there’s more granularity (no pun) to it–adding a weak but relatively cheap and reusable Initiative boost made the item feel useful to anyone without overpowering it.

The rest of the things on my list already had spells that affected them: haste and slow. But an item that simply had haste, slow, and Initiative buttons on it wouldn’t fly. It’d barely be Wondrous, much less a Superstar.

I was ready to scrap this idea too until I took one more look at Tip 27:

Every year, items make it into the Top 32 that you could consider a spell-in-a-can, or an item with a joke name, or a toy. They make it into the Top 32 because despite that flaw, they do something really cool or new. You can add flavor to a spell-in-a-can, you can change the name of a poorly-named item, you can change the shape of a toy–if the concept of the item is cool, it deserves a second look.

…

So give your item a hard look before you hit “Submit.” Does it fall into one of these “auto-reject” categories? If so, is there some way you can make it better, cooler, more innovative, more eye-catching, more… Superstar? If there isn’t, maybe you should submit a different item. If there is, make those changes… and look at it yet again.

I thought I could take the concept of a combat time container and give it a Superstar twist while keeping it practical, especially for lower-level characters where speed-related spells or items could be tough to come by or justify.

If you aren’t having fun, go have fun

I also felt I’d have less fun making an item with another, safer concept–and that feeling was confirmed after I’d made Bottled Time, read the text again, ran through some thought exercises and tests, read it again, put it aside and tried to come up with a better idea.

I couldn’t. When I’d think about it, I’d smile. I’d almost accidentally sketched up encounters that could take advantage of it, and when I stepped back from the whole exercise I realized what I was doing.

I’d gotten so wrapped up in testing the item that I had a drawn map, pages of notes, a half-dozen post-its in the Core book, two character sheets and a half-dozen monster tokens out.

I was prepping a game. If an item I made was getting to be that inspiring, I was willing to throw it to the wolves and watch it get chewed up. I had something I could work with for my own fun and enjoyment, so I already felt like I’d done well.

Breaking down the item

I’m going in the order that I built the item to help illustrate the process.

Description:
Swirling inside a corked wine bottle are what appears to be a few dozen grains of sand suspended in air.

I thought briefly about a pouch and a box before Jim Croce showed up.

I have no idea why, but “Time in a Bottle” (EDIT: More likely this version; thanks, Amy.) popped into my head. The metaphor stuck, I couldn’t unstick it, so I smashed it into the hourglass metaphor and had a simple, straightforward, low-key but unique visual.

This worked so well that next year I’ll put “Still Bill” on and see if Mr. Withers also has some weird link to magical item creation.

Shaking the bottle adds a +1 bonus to the carrier’s Initiative for 30 minutes. The bottle can be shaken three times per day; shaking it a fourth time will cause it to explode.

This was the basic function I wanted out of it: something that was nice to have at any level and could be used when combat was inevitable but not a surprise.

It didn’t make sense to me for it to be inherently consumable–the time isn’t the Wondrous Item, but the bottle. I limited its use to once per day until I implemented the twist at the end.

I also thought about how volatile time can be. People lose hours at work or play without realizing it. Stress, shock and trauma can make time appear to slow down or speed up. Sleep is straight-up weird. So rather than limit usage by turning the item off, I wanted to take that volatility and punish players who didn’t keep track of it by destroying the item if it gets overused.

I also know that stuff gets jostled. If someone’s holding this in combat and an enemy tries to grab it, or knock it out of hand, a GM could easily call that a shake and pop the bottle–triggering the next effect.

If the bottle is shattered, the time within implodes upon itself and sucks it from the area around it, affecting everything within a 15-foot radius of the impact with the equivalent of a slow spell for three rounds.

After I put this in, I was ready to wrap things up. I had a reusable stat boost, and now I had a spell-in-a-can that I felt dodged the SIAC issue because it doesn’t target the same way as the actual spell, and targeted an area over time instead of a specific enemy immediately, giving it some flexibility.

I got lots of play ideas out of this, figuring it was the Superstar twist: MacGuyver it into a component of a trap. Throw it like a flask at an enemy, or toss it like a slowdown smoke bomb to escape. You lose the Initiative bonus forever, but it wasn’t much to begin with, so this doesn’t end up being a second effect nobody dares to use.

(In retrospect, I should have been more specific about how to throw it as a weapon. Cutting the final line of the description and using those words here would’ve strengthened the entry.)

I played a quick battle test of it and had a decent time, but I wasn’t feeling great. I had a minor once-a-day stat boost and a consumable SIAC. Not bad for a first try, but this is the fabric of time and space in a bottle. “Is there some way you can make it better, cooler, more innovative, more eye-catching, more… Superstar?”

Hell, yes!

Uncorking the bottle, which takes a full round, sprays time from the bottle with significant force, and anything within a 15-foot cone of the bottle’s spout immediately experiences effects equivalent to a haste spell that lasts for three rounds.

Shake a bottle of something compressed and that top wants to fly off. I already had it exploding if it was shaken too often, so this was a logical addition. I initially had it spray slow and become inert afterward–instead of the AOE you get a cone. Two kinds of slow, you clever devil!

But again, this is time. Slow is useful against enemies, but not everything is about enemies. If I can use time as a debuff, I can use it as a buff, so if breaking the bottle spills slow, opening it fires a spray of haste.

My PC asks me, “What if I want haste on myself?” Well, pop that bottle into your own damn face, you ugly piece of paper. What that cork does to your nose is your problem.

(Strongly noted: Sean rejected Bottled Time because “a time-themed item using haste and slow mechanics is old hat, not superstar.” Neil Spicer wasn’t impressed by bolting the three effects in a way that he described as “boring and not all that innovative”; Jerall Toi said they “seem rather bland.” Goblinworks’ Ryan Dancey called the whole thing out for being “effectively a staff (a magic item that produces two or more spell effects). That should disqualify it.”

These are true facts, and take careful note of them if you’re considering entering Superstar. But read on, dear reader, read on, because fortunately my story doesn’t end here.)

Once the bottle is opened, its effects are instantly spent; shattered bottles are destroyed. The effects continue even if those affected leave the cone or radius.

I decided to clarify how the effects work, and specify that opening the bottle was not renewable in the same way as shaking it. It made sense to me already, but after reading comments on past winners I wanted to head off any such confusion at the pass.

At this point, I was pretty proud of this bugger and ran it through the word counter. I came in short and felt nice about that–I’d put something together with a nice economy of words.

Problem was, looking at it again I realized it’s still just an item with haste, slow and Initiative buttons. It’s still not Superstar. Fun? Maybe. Some flavor? A little. But that’s it. A once-a-day effect with two ways to make it a consumable. At best, it’s a yawner; at worst, it’s too overwrought for what it does.

So I went back again. What could I add (or take away) next?

It’s a bottle. If you open it, it’s still a bottle. The bottle is the item, not the time, so what can an open Bottled Time do that any other bottle can’t?

I went back to how wibbly-wobbly time can be. How could someone store time? Where would stored time come from? I ran through metaphors about saving time, even going off the dumb end of the pool with daylight savings jokes and stitching threads of time.

But what’s something adventurers frequently do, takes a lot of time, and has applicable rules that could be affected? They sleep, and they sleep so they don’t get fatigue penalties. Sleeping also advances game time for GMs, can give PCs bonuses, and recharges a lot of items/abilities/spells. It’s a fundamental game mechanic ripe for exploitation.

If the bottle can be emptied, it can be refilled. If the thing that makes sleep work as a game mechanic is the time put into it… let’s steal that currency from sleeping and shove it in the bottle instead.

An intact open bottle can be refilled twice by corking it after sleeping near it for at least 8 hours. Such sleep does not provide healing rest; anyone who sleeps within 15 feet of the opened bottle wakes up fatigued (-2 penalty to Strength and Dexterity, can’t run or charge). Each refill reduces the length of haste or slow effects by one round.

(Strongly noted: The refill mechanism is what redeemed the item so strongly with one of the judges, Clark Peterson, that he spent his first Golden Ticket on Bottled Time. The ticket put Bottle Time in the Top 32 over the other judges’ objections. Ryan also was very excited about the recharge mechanism and voted to keep despite the staff issues. The recharge mechanism was the “something extra” that elevated the item. If I had stopped at Initiative, slow and haste, I never would’ve made it.

The moral of the story isn’t to keep adding more features. It’s to find that hook, make it grab you as a player, then as a GM, then as someone who’s seen everything six times today. Don’t sacrifice utility for the hook, and don’t sacrifice flavor for utility.

That’s why this is so freaking difficult. You have to grab interest without going overboard; you have to show design chops but not over-design it; you have to make it stand out in the setting without completely subverting it.)

I initially thought about sleeping with the bottle in hand to recharge it and only robbing the holder of rest; in retrospect I should’ve stuck with that, as it’s simpler and the area-effect sleep drain raised concerns in judging. But I decided to submit it with a 15-foot radius for two reasons:

1. It would lead to the owner being isolated from the party to recharge it. Not only was he sacrificing his own sleep, he’d either have to sacrifice his party’s sleep as well–or put physical distance between himself and them. In a bunkhouse that could mean being on the other side of the room, or in another room or building altogether; at camp it could mean being 15 feet further from the fire, from light, from protection. Fatigued for a day and vulnerable for the night, in exchange for some neat (if minor) effects.
2. It could be used offensively against sleeping enemies. Secret an opened bottle away in a foe’s lair while they sleep, then confront them in the morning. “What’s the matter, Zagan the Deathdealer? Have a long night?”

I also thought reducing the duration of the effects on each recharge gave it a degree of impermanence, and I jumped back to bump the times the owner could draw an Initiative bonus from one to three shakes a day to compensate. I wanted a degree of diminishing returns on it, especially at the end of the design process once I’d priced it out.

In any case, now I’m cutting flips, officially converted to a Pathfinder fan and genuinely excited about running a RPG for the first time in a very long while.

And I had words left! So of course, I shot myself in the foot and jumped overboard.

Reusing the bottle for consumables and drinking from it may cause the user to experience vivid dreams about his or her past.

I thought I was adding a little something extra here, but I wasn’t. It’s useless. This item already does a lot, and now I’ve overloaded it with something nebulous. A PC or a GM sees this and says, “So what?”

Did I really think this would entice anyone to reuse the bottle? It doesn’t grant anything tangible or do anything that doesn’t require some GM work to accommodate.

Judges quite rightly blasted this line. I didn’t have to use all the words, and it didn’t need padding.

Aura medium transmutation; CL 7th
Slot hands; Price 9,000 gp; Weight 1 lb.

Construction
Requirements Craft Wondrous Item, haste, slow; Cost 4,500 gp

I ditched the math on this second go-round and instead looked for items in the Core Rulebook that did similar things. I didn’t note those items down and can’t remember which ones inspired the price or caster level, but this section hasn’t drawn many complaints; a few comments liked how it was accessible and sensible at lower levels.

To be honest? This chunk was a poorly educated guess that got lucky.

Name: Bottled Time

The name came last. I wanted a simple name that was fundamentally descriptive while drawing attention.

Outside of song lyrics, “Time in a Bottle” is just a clunky way of saying “Bottled Time,” so I went with the simpler phrasing.

As it turns out, “drawing attention” by using the word “time” was a bad idea; it set the judges on edge before they’d read the item. Time items have a heavy negative bias in Superstar, and since mine wasn’t affecting time in the most obvious way, it even came across as a misnomer.

But I don’t know what else I’d call it at this point. Time goes in one way and comes out differently. All of the active effects manipulate timing in some way, and the refill method in anchored to a specific length of time.

How long did I spend on this?

I read the Core Rulebook over a long open day, and spent about four hours on development: an hour building, gloating over and scrapping the first concept; the next two hours building Bottled Time; and an hour testing and playing around with it.

I get fussy and my confidence falls off a cliff the longer I mess with something, so I submitted it as soon as I hit a point where I was satisfied and feeling good.

If I take anything away from the time I spent on it (and, looking at other winners and entries, how that doesn’t even look like very much time in retrospect), it’s this:

• Don’t overthink it. A magic item has to win interest in a short period of time. It’s like a joke–if someone else has to explain its value to you, you blew it.
• Don’t underthink it. This would be dropping a couple effects and walking away. A Superstar item can solve a headpalmingly obvious hole in the game, but it can’t itself be as obvious a fix.
• Don’t under-research it. The day I spent looking over the Core Rulebook made this happen. I’d seen haste and slow and I knew, at least in the Core, that there wasn’t a similar item. Other items I saw used specific features or systems that didn’t have many applicable magic items, and a big part of Superstar is seeing the big picture and filling in a valuable missing detail with a high level of color and utility.
• Don’t over-research it. Going forward, this is my biggest fear–I tend to go niche when I write. Going too niche can be a drawback; if it involves a mechanic that’s not available to the vast majority of players, few players will ever see it.

That’s all, folks

If you want to comment, I don’t recommend doing it here. Jump back over to the Paizo forums thread for the item.

(EDIT: I cleaned up a few grammar/spelling nits and fleshed out some parts. I also want to thank my local PFS Venture-Captain, Don Walker, for GMing that aforementioned first game of Pathfinder and introducing me to the local Pathfinder community.)

Thanks for reading. I hope I didn’t bore anyone out of wanting to try Superstar! Congrats to the Top 32, and here’s hoping I can make it back in 2013 with some actual Pathfinder experience under my belt.

There are inherent problems with binary social networks. The idea that someone is either full-on in your life (and therefore has access to everything about you) or not at all is not how it works offline. You tend to share certain information only with certain groups of people. Only some people will be interested in photos of your daughter, whereas those same people will probably not be interested in blog posts about your work.

Google Circles aims to solve these problems by allowing you to drag and drop people into distinct buckets, and letting you only share what you want with each circle. And yes, the UI makes it really easy to do this. It’s great design.

The problem is that it’s just too much work. I’ve long since given up trying to maintain my Circles, and I’m pretty sure I’m not alone. Circles also lost its core utility for me. After I put about 100 people into different buckets I couldn’t remember who I put where, and what I was supposed to share with which Circle. So I just gave up and started sharing everything publicly.

It doesn’t matter how great and fun an experience is, good UI design cannot fix a broken solution.

I asked my friend Russell Holly to write a short blog post about how CM will never contain Carrier IQ. Enjoy.

Everybody with access to a web browser over the last week or so has undoubtedly seen the recent upheaval about Carrier IQ. The truth is, Carrier IQ has been around for quite some time. It is one of the nastier examples of bloatware installed by carriers, and it is more than likely something that will always be there in some form or fashion. That is, as long as your phone is running the OEM provided version of Android.

As this version of Android is based entirely on work from the Android Open Source Project, the CyanogenMod team would like to assure everyone that Carrier IQ has never, and will never be a part of our Operating System. There is no risk of this kind of software to ever be shipped as a part of CyanogenMod, period. Please, take it upon yourselves to educate anyone who is concerned about Carrier IQ, and offer them CyanogenMod as the only real opt-out they are likely to get any time soon.

I couldn’t agree more with his words. We at CyanogenMod would like everyone to know that if you are running our software, you are not running theirs.

What if a little site you love doesn’t have a business model? Yell at the developers! Explain that you are tired of good projects folding and are willing to pay cash American dollar to prevent that from happening. It doesn’t take prohibitive per-user revenue to put a project in the black. It just requires a number greater than zero.

I love free software and could not have built my site without it. But free web services are not like free software. If your free software project suddenly gets popular, you gain resources: testers, developers and people willing to pitch in. If your free website takes off, you lose resources. Your time is spent firefighting and your money all goes to the nice people at Linode.

So stop getting caught off guard when your favorite project sells out! “They were getting so popular, why did they have to shut it down?” Because it’s hard to resist a big payday when you are rapidly heading into debt. And because it’s culturally acceptable to leave your user base high and dry if you get a good offer, citing self-inflicted financial hardship.

Like a service? Make them charge you or show you ads. If they won’t do it, clone them and do it yourself. Soon you’ll be the only game in town!

 

But seriously, I shouldn’t complain. It’s free! And dockable panels are finally coming, a mere seven years after the feature request.

Open source rocks!

There’s a document circulating today that allegedly contains the list of words that the Pakistan Telecommunications Authority (PTA) wants banned from text messages. A few tipsters forwarded it our way after noticing that the list included phrases like “Rae Carruth,” “Neon Deon,” and “He Hate Me,”—all things that would be strange to text in a casual conversation in Pakistan because they all have a lot to do with the NFL.

Out of curiosity, we pulled up the infamous list of the more than 1,100 words that the NFL Shop once banned from use on personalized jerseys, and lo: It’s exactly the same as the list that’s been passed around for Pakistan’s censorship. This hypothetically presents a terrible conundrum for Pakistan’s biggest Deion Sanders fan.

 

I’ve removed my Google+ profile, not because they added chat. Not even because chat subsequently, and without my permission, loaded all my circles into my GTalk contacts, which I’d just spent (and now wasted) an hour cleaning up a couple weeks ago.

I removed it for the same reason I killed off my Facebook profile: I am so over non-consensual, irreversible changes to services, changes that are opt-out instead of opt-in and delivered without warning.

Google didn’t learn anything from on-the-chopping-block Buzz¹, although this time–at least, AFAIK–they didn’t broadcast the names of my contacts publicly through this “feature.” (Which honestly is just GTalk with them dicking around in my contacts list, and perhaps an acknowledgement that most people don’t want or can’t use video-chat Hangouts or don’t trust one-person Plus shares.)

The feature and its effects aren’t that painful. It’s actually a marginal improvement in usability to integrate chat with Plus, and another step toward Google inevitably making Plus the landing page for Google users rather than Gmail.

But what Google never seems to realize is that even though they own your data, by breaking the fourth wall and manipulating your data without asking you–without even telling you before it happens, even in the most minor ways imaginable–users’ minds immediately go down the slippery slope.

If Google can add contacts without telling me, they can remove them! If they can do it with contacts, what about my email, my Android phone, my calendar items? My friends, comments and shared items!²

What Google doesn’t understand is trust, especially from the service provider side. Things like the DLF are cute and occasionally useful, but ultimately pointless–sure, I can take my data from Google, but where can I go with it? It’s not like Facebook lets me import posts from Plus. Hell, I don’t even think you can import exported posts back into Plus.

Trust isn’t ownership, it’s believing that the data you put in there today will be there tomorrow, just like it is today. The UI can change, and people can whine about that, but as long as the data is still there, and the functionality is still there, that’s all UI complaints ultimately are–whining.

But fuck with my data, regardless of your intentions, and I’m gone. Readerpocalypse turned me from inviting people to Plus to using it primarily to complain about Google, so I’m already with one foot out the door. I was around for the Buzz screwup and Wave, too.

Plus is new, though, and so are many of its users. Most will probably like this or ignore it. A few will complain. Google, being Google, won’t use the complaints as a warning, but instead will use the data to justify continuing to fuck with your data.

They’ll do it because they own it, and you didn’t comment, much less complain, the last time, so why would you complain the next time?

1. Will they kill Buzz on Thanksgiving, just like they killed social Reader on Halloween? If so, man, what’re they going to do for Christmas?
2. Oh shut up, already.

The last time out they built the Hobbit holes and structures like most movie sets. They were temporary, not functional past the time the crew needed them to work. This time out they made a deal with the landowner to make this site an official and long lasting attraction for fans of the movies.

Forty-Four Hobbit holes were built to be permanent, with retaining walls, waterproofed roofs, etc. The stone bridge was constructed with a steel superstructure covered with real stone cladding. The Green Dragon is the most impressive of them all because it was built with a functioning fireplace, plumbing, water pipes and the works.

Hennah said the plans were to actually turn The Green Dragon into a real, working pub, but that’s all on the landowners at this point, I believe. I can picture many a geek wedding happening in Matamata, vows under the Party Tree and reception at The Green Dragon. Ah, geek love!

While they did remove a lot of set dressing meaning props like chairs, ladders and various odds and ends the Hobbit holes will remain and all can be entered safely. They even left the curtains in the windows.

Take anything AICN with half a grain of salt, but if this is true, actual hobbit houses.

That exchange between Bill Gates and The Rock in the early 2000s, as artificial and cheesy as it was, did exhibit one thing: Microsoft, at a high level within its corporate structure, knew what kind of audience it was going for. You can see evidence of this with the early Bungie acquisition, the early publisher partnerships for launch titles, the specifications of the Xbox hardware itself, and the celebrities that it paid to pump up the console. Maybe Microsoft was playing heavily off of gamer cliches, but its strategy worked, attracting the 18-34 year-old male demographic.

It’s not a strategy that all game developers should take, aiming for the “hardcore audience.” But when you’re a console maker, it’s about defining the audience, listening to it, and configuring all-important developer relationships to suit those market demands.

A blatant, intentional helmet-to-helmet hit won’t get a guy thrown out. You can cut the knees of an engaged blocker all day long, and you probably won’t even be penalized. You can do whatever it was that Jerome Simpson did, and you’re good to go. Wrong color shoes, though? You are not welcome on our field, sir.

Come on over! RT @jobsathubspot: If you hate florescent lighting, cubicles, spreadsheets, and jerks; come work @HubSpot:…

I’ve been biting my tongue on the whole HubSpot thing, but at least three of those things are pretty common there, and there’s nothing inherently wrong with them.

Come on, guys. Set the correct expectations and you’ll get people who fit the culture better than I did. Keep blowing them and you’ll attract the wrong people for the wrong reasons (that’s me!)–or worse yet, disappoint the right people for the wrong reasons.

Last month, an anonymous blogger popped up on WordPress and Twitter, aiming a giant flamethrower at Mac-friendly writers like John Gruber, Marco Arment and MG Siegler. As he unleashed wave after wave of spittle-flecked rage at “Apple puppets” and “Cupertino douchebags,” I was reminded again of John Gabriel’s theory about the effects of online anonymity.

Out of curiosity, I tried to see who the mystery blogger was.

He was using all the ordinary precautions for hiding his identity — hiding personal info in the domain record, using a different IP address from his other sites, and scrubbing any shared resources from his WordPress install.

Nonetheless, I found his other blog in under a minute — a thoughtful site about technology and local politics, detailing his full name, employer, photo, and family information. He worked for the local government, and if exposed, his anonymous blog could have cost him his job.

I didn’t identify him publicly, but let him quietly know that he wasn’t as anonymous as he thought he was. He stopped blogging that evening, and deleted the blog a week later.

So, how did I do it? The unlucky blogger slipped up and was ratted out by an unlikely source: Google Analytics.

tl;dr version: Reverse lookup of GA ID.

Why would anyone blogging anonymously care about analytics?

@drewbrees: “I’m watching Baylen on the baby monitor waking up singing “Black and Gold, Super Bowl”. Is that normal?”

Best baby since this one.

A takeout restaurant that specializes in grilled cheese sandwiches is expanding a bit more into the Boston area, with their next location being in the western suburbs of the city.

If this sort of crap is successful enough to expand, I really need to get into it. Those jokes about “Two Hot Bricks, American Cheese and Some Bread Food Truck” need to become reality.

In the meantime, here’s how to get the great taste of (insert bullshit grilled cheese [food truck, restaurant, sidewalk stand staffed by 4-year-olds] establishment) in your own home:

1. Make something flat very very hot. Like so hot you can’t touch it.
2. Get some bread, butter, and cheese from the store. (I’m assuming because you need this tutorial, you don’t already own any of these things.)
• Doesn’t even matter what kind — the wackier it is, the more gourmet the sandwich.
3. If you really want that gourmet grilled cheese experience, put a bunch of other shit in there until it becomes what most people call a “melt” or sometimes “cheeseburger”.
4. Put all that shit between two pieces of bread.
• If you need help unwrapping the bread, or the cheese, don’t hesitate to comment below.
5. Rub some butter all over that bread. The more butter you use, the more gourmet it’ll taste.
6. Put the bread and shit on the hot flat thing for a minute or so.
7. Flip it over. Don’t use your fingers! Use that spatula thing, that long thing with the flat thing on the end? Looks like a fly swatter. You probably use it as a fly swatter, and that’s OK, just wash it off first.
8. Take the grilled cheese off the hot thing and eat it.

h3h: Can we inspire more kids to pursue space-related science and research? If so, how? (permalink)

neiltyson: Kids are never the problem. They are born scientists. The problem is always the adults. The beat the curiosity out of the kids. They out-number kids. They vote. They wield resources. That’s why my public focus is primarily adults. (permalink)

izibo: If you could impress one thing on young people today, what would it be? (permalink)

neiltyson: That adults are not all they’re cracked up to be. And most of them are wrong most of the time. This can be quite revelatory  for a kid – often launching them on a personal quest of exploration, rather than of Q&A sessions with their parents. (permalink)

In case you missed my much more verbose thoughts on the topic, forget changing education, just follow this kid.

We’ll make no judgments about why you want this or what you want to do with it, but baconlube is here and it’s real for a limited time. Keep It Sizzlin’.

When exploration is complete, you often have nothing to hold up to your project manager to explain or justify the expenditure of time. Here’s what you tell them, “My job isn’t just building product; I also build people.”

Syed: I see that the serial number is for the upgrade InDesign CS5.5 product.
Syed: While the upgrade option is not valid from the Design Premium CS4 to InDesign CS5.5. As the InDesign is a individual product and the Design Premium is a Suite product.
Garrett Guillotte: So how to upgrade only InDesign CS4 to CS5.5?
Syed: However, as per the relaxation policy, as you have purchased the individual product which is part of a Suite, we will go ahead and provide you a new serial number, so that you can install the InDesign CS5.5 as a full version.

Yep. Buy InDesign as part of a suite and you can’t upgrade it.

Except you can, after Adobe support gives you a free full-install serial, thanks to the undocumented “relaxation policy.”

Adobe, everybody.

“These days, students usually know a little bit more than teachers with the technology. Sorry. So this is a resource to teachers, and educators should recognize this resource and make good use of it.”

If you know me, you know this is one of my all-time rant starters.

Making video games is hard work that requires knowledge in a broad spectrum of fields. Many of them, like math and physics, are fields in which traditional teaching methods have failed children since the day the first kid got a home Internet connection.

Kids love to make stuff. Kids love video games. Kids want to make video games. But because Boomers control public schools, not only is the idea of kids making video games in school shot down, it’s shot down with public aggression.

Because Grand Theft Auto is a video game, and because of gamer culture’s high-profile reprehensibility, anything with “video game” on it is shat upon with delight on all levels — except, of course, among kids, who love it all the more because many kids have fantastic bullshit detectors when it comes to adults telling them about right and wrong.

The few adults who understand the potential of game dev in classrooms — and the even fewer Boomers, and the precious fewer Boomers in policy positions in schools or government — do what adults do: they play semantics, spin it, dress it up. Try to sneak it in the front door.

In other words, they — hell, we — call it “interactive media”, because “games in the classroom” jumps up the ass of every shithead parent who sees their child’s time as a commodity to be traded in exchange for a cut in tuition debt down the road. Or we miss the point, fundamentally and entirely, and come up with bullshit like gamification.

But we’ve finally reached the point where kids don’t need Boomers anymore. They don’t need adults. They can finally fix their own shit.

Thomas doesn’t have my excuses from growing up, where I started writing code at 3 years old but hit a wall as soon as the one book on BASIC that I had access to ran out of pages. He can’t say he doesn’t have access to experts, mentors, training, or resources, because he’s a digital native in the truest sense of the word.

He has w3schools, Codecademy, RubyMonk; he has the Khan Academy, OpenCourseWare, Wikipedia, and yeah, even TED; even better, he has Stack Overflow, Quora, and endless forums and open source projects with active communities.

Thomas is proud as hell when he says this, and he should be. But it still breaks my heart:

Not many kids know where to go to find out how to make a program. I mean for soccer, you could go to a soccer team. For violin, you could get lessons for a violin. But what if you want to make an app? Kids’ parents might have done some of these things when they were young, but not many parents have written apps!

You know what I wanted to shout when he asked where to go to find out how to make a program?

His fucking school.

Yes, he has a teacher’s sponsorship, which means he has at least one progressive-thinking adult in his school system. He’s fortunate to be in Manhattan Beach instead of, say, Holly Beach.

He has friends behind him, which means he’s in a social environment that doesn’t discourage these pursuits in favor of others.

And shockingly, yes, he has his parents’ sponsorship, with them backing him financially and philosophically.

Even with all of these exceptional advantages, he has to teach himself how to build an app, and build a club himself for his school to provide a structured place to share his knowledge. He has to get his own iOS device and learn the SDK on his own.

When I worked on a non-profit project to get game dev into Louisiana public school curricula, and when we ran those kids through two weeks — just two weeks! — of it, it changed their lives. It changed their perception of education. It gave them goals they wanted to learn, sparked leadership and entrepreneurship, organically fostered teamwork.

Put game development tools in front of kids with no experience, training, or even interest and they’ll carve out roles for themselves on their own. Put them in front of those tools with an experienced mentor and they’ll show up the adults.

But as an adult, I keep forgetting that we don’t have to save these kids from themselves, or a lack of opportunity, or their environment. We have to save them from us, mostly by getting the hell out of their way.

So here’s to Thomas Suarez, and hopefully a million more kids who won’t let deficient curricula, dumbass backwards old people who try to control their future, dumbass misguided adult allies who try and fail to fix the older dumbasses, and especially their infuriating helicopter parents who live in abject terror for decades about college acceptance letters, get between them and their dreams.

I’m proud of him, I can’t express how proud I am of him. I’m equally disgusted in us for failing a kid like him in 2011.

This is probably the best we can do, which is pathetic. His club won’t reach the kids who don’t already have an interest in logic, which means those kids won’t see the benefits of thinking in code or have the same chance to understand how the world works in an engaging way that speaks in a vocabulary they already own.

What if Thomas couldn’t afford a iPod Touch, a Mac, and the App Store fee? What if he couldn’t afford a computer? Whoops! The world gets one fewer inspiring TED talk to watch today and one fewer kid sows himself the seeds of a few million dollars, or an inspirational career as an educator, or any of a million things Thomas now gets with this background that peers without his gifts and determination and work ethic and luck won’t.

But if the kids with an interest in code learn, build, and teach it on their own, and if they can resist having any of it hijacked by adults — well-meaning or otherwise — they at least won’t continue to be smothered by the stupidity inherent in being ruled by people who are simply old.

You’ll have to delve into the software whenever you want to adjust volume.

Finally, maybe the spot where Sproles is the biggest improvement over Bush is as a runner in the backfield. For his career, Sproles averages roughly a full yard per rush attempt more than Bush, and Sproles is averaging a staggering 8.9 yards per carry this season. Of course, those rushes are situational — Pierre Thomas and Mark Ingram tend to handle the short yardage and inside plays — but that’s precisely the point. Sproles is a dynamic space player, and that’s how the Saints use him. The best run play for Sproles is the draw, but they’ve used him in a variety of other runs this season, including toss sweeps and anything else that gets him in open grass.

Whole thing is a great football read. (I might be extrapolating the praise a little bit much, but it’s a strong case.)

Please correct me, but I think, I found a serious problem with regular Expressions in Indesign CS5.5 (and possibly in other apps from CS5.5).

Let’s start with simple example:

————-
var range = "a-a,a,a-a,a";
var regEx = /(a+-a+|a+)(,(a+-a+|a+))*/;
alert( "Match:" +regEx.test(range)+"\nLeftContext: "+RegExp.leftContext+"\nRightContext: "+RegExp.rightContext );
 ————-

What I expected was true match and the left  and the right context should be empty. In Indesign CS3 that is correct BUT NOT in CS5.5.

In CS 5.5 it seems that the only first “a-a” is matched and the rest is return as the rightContext – looks like big change (if not parsing error in RegExp engine).

Please correct me if I am wrong.

The second example – how to freeze ID CS5.5:

————-
var range = "a-a,a,a-a,a";var regEx = /(a+-a+|a+)(,(a+-a+|a+)){8,}/;
alert( "Match:" +regEx.test(range)+"\nLeftContext: "+RegExp.leftContext+"\nRightContext: "+RegExp.rightContext );
————–

As you can see it differs only with the {8,} part instead of *

Run it in CS5.5 and you will see that the ID hangs (in CS3 of course it runs flawlessly}.

The third example – how to freeze ID 5.5 in one line (I posted it earlier in Photoshop forum because similiar problem was called earlier):

—————
alert((/(n|s)? /gmi).test('s') );
—————

As you can guess – it freezes the CS5.5 (CS3 passes the test).

Please correct me if I am doing something wrong or it’s the problem of Adobe.

Best regards,

Daniel Brylak

NYT: But papers in your chain are giving up control deciding what goes in the newspaper.

(MediaNews and Journal Register CEO John) Paton: They’re still deciding everything that goes in the local pages, they’re still deciding what goes on the front page, they’re simply, basically, pressing buttons to have other people get that done. Nobody is taking over that front page, no one is taking over the fact that the mayor story is less important than the X, Y, Z story.

NYT: Are all your papers going to end up looking the same?

Paton: I think we’re going to end up with three or four common templates depending on the size of the paper, some are tabs, some are broadsheet, and some are square tabs as we call them. That’s the hardest part for me to get over right now, should they be a common template? The smaller the newspaper the easier it is to sell this, the bigger the newspaper, it’s almost impossible and now that we have MediaNews Group, we might end up having to carve out the bigger papers because it’s not good for them. The Denver Post is a much different animal than the Middletown paper, it just is.

To the surprise of no one — except rabid “Community” fans — NBC has benched “Community” in order to make room for the return of “30 Rock” Thursdays at 8, in January, the network announced Monday.

Note to “Community” fans: Tina Fey having been interviewed by Brian Williams last Monday on the second episode of his new newsmag “Rock Center” about the return of her comedy series was a clue.

In other mid-season NBC schedule news: the network’s laugh-tracked sitcom “Whitney” and its girl-parts gags are moving to 8 p.m. Wednesdays, paired with new comedy “Are you There, Chelsea?” — based on Chelsea Handler’s book, “Are you There, Vodka? It’s Me, Chelsea.”